I've starved for this. Now that I have her here with me, it feels like I've spent the last fifteen years alone on an island.
"Cornelius wanted this deal. He spent decades planning and scheming to take Thornwood Industries global." I say it without thinking, just wanting to keep talking so she keeps looking at me like that. "He had the same conversations with Adelaide Windemere's father for twenty years and the old man always refused to sell."
Maddie is very still beside me. She always goes still when she listens to someone. She's not just good at it. She's perfect.
"But things are different now," she offers.
"My grandfather ran out of time, but I have plenty." I look out at the roses. "I'm going to succeed where he couldn't."
She doesn't say anything. She just lets the thing I haven't said sit there between us, which is exactly the best thing she could do.
"You are aware," I say, "that you are now in possession of information that is technically privileged. A multinational like Thornwood Industries acquiring an old name like Windemere Maritime is going to make quite a stir in the market once it's public. There are people in three time zones who would pay significant money for what I just told you."
"How much?" she asks, her brow lifting and her eyes going comically wide.
"Enough to pay for that timing belt your Toyota Corolla needs." I chuckle. "Heck, enough to buy a mansion to park that old thing and let it live the rest of its natural life in comfort."
"Tempting." She tips her mug again and takes a long sip while casting me a side glance. "So why are you telling me, if it's that sensitive?"
I look at her.
"Because I trust you," I say. "There are not many people in this world I trust. You are one of them." I pause. "You always were."
A flicker crosses her face, quiet and quick. She looks away, out at the rose garden.
"Can I ask you something?" she asks, her face suddenly serious. "It may break our agreement not to talk about the past though, but you've kind of already broke it, so..."
"Anything you want to ask, ask it." And I've never meant the words more.
"Why didn't you call?" she says.
She doesn't add anything to it. She doesn't need to. We both know what she's talking about.
"I wanted to. I tried," I say. "More times than I can count. I would get to the last digit and put the phone down." I pause. "And then time passed and I assumed you had moved on. Found someone. Built a life, gotten married and had kids." I keep my eyes on the middle distance. "You had every reason to. I had no right to disrupt the life you'd built."
Maddie is quiet for a moment. "I assumed the same thing about you."
I look at her.
She looks back at me, and there is something wry in it, and something tired. "I figured you were in Boston, running your empire, dating some spectacularly beautiful model." She lifts a shoulder. "I was waiting for the wedding announcement in a magazine and being extremely mature about it."
"I never got married."
"I know." She exhales. "We're both idiots."
I breathe out. "Yes. We are."
She looks at me for a long moment. Her gaze travels over my face like she's re-reading a book she used to have memorized. My gaze drops to her mouth. Her full, plump, deeply inconvenient mouth.
It stays there.
"You're the bigger idiot, though," she says.
Then she reaches up and kisses me. Her taste fills my mouth as our tongues collide.
It is not a tentative kiss. It's a Maddie Berwick kiss, which is to say it is decisive and warm and lays absolute waste to my sanity. My hand finds her jaw before my brain has finished processing what is happening, and for approximately five seconds I just stay there, holding her face, kissing her back, while every wall I have spent fifteen years building in the specific shape of her absence shudders at its foundation.
Then my hands move.
